I actually started out here at Bluesnews, thanks to my brother-in-law. That was way back in 1997. I also liked Redwood and Stomped. My memory is a bit cloudy at this point, but I seem to remember Redwood being called Redwood-stomped.com, but it was probably 2 separate sites. I just remember Redwood being down for maintenance for a very long time and it never came back online. I also frequented Voodoo Extreme before they got bought up and turned into mainstream junk.

Back then I was playing Quake DM for like 14 hours a day. Aaaaahhh the joys of not having any responsibilities and owning a 28.8 modem, a 150MHz Pentium PC, and a Canopus Pure 3D video card. That was my 1st online game and PC and I was completely addicted from the get-go. Bluesnews and those other sites were the icing on the cake for me.

I seriously don't know what I would have done all these years without having Bluesnews to read every day.

DG wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:30:Hmm, there's also a lot of sites still going that just aren't the same.

Anandtech has always been my favourite. The articles are still good and can still get good answers on the boards, but I no longer feel any sense of "community" on the boards when I drop by. Actually I rarely feel any sense of community online anywhere now.

Even Reddit has nose-dived, on the main page anyway, I think thanks to the demise of Digg.

Anand seems to actually update infrequently, so people went elsewhere.

I agree with the "lack of community," though. Take a standard consumer tech site. You basically have The Verge and Engadget as the most updated ones, and therefore the best ease/quality ratio. But the comments are pointless. They'll get hundreds to thousands of comments, mostly complete asinine crap. Almost everything evolves into trolling over Windows vs iOS vs Android. And even if you have something to contribute, and even if the discussion is meaningful, by that point there are already so many posts that it just isn't worth the effort.Same with something like AVClub. Simply too many users yelling on top of each other to be a community or conversation.

Hmm, there's also a lot of sites still going that just aren't the same.

Anandtech has always been my favourite. The articles are still good and can still get good answers on the boards, but I no longer feel any sense of "community" on the boards when I drop by. Actually I rarely feel any sense of community online anywhere now.

Even Reddit has nose-dived, on the main page anyway, I think thanks to the demise of Digg.

Oh, that reminds me. Anybody remember a site called Psycho News? Somehow, from that site when it went under, I switched to Blue's News. I remember thinking there was some relation between them or something, but it's all pretty hazy.

Blues and Voodoo Extreme were the two sites I used to check every day. Then VE re-designed their page and it was taking 5-10 minutes to load, so I quit going there. I was still on dialup back then, but I think the only broadband available at the time was ISDN, and I only knew one person that had it.

Ratty wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 12:30:Only one of those fallen sites I ever visited regularly was Voodoo Extreme. I never really liked it there for some reason. But it was all there was after my favorite Stomped changed from a gaming aggregator to on online gaming league. I was real sad about that. Then after a little bit at VE I discovered Blue News and never looked back.

Here's hoping Blues has many more years until it too appears on a list.

I was a regular at VE. Billy made me laugh.

"We choose the right to be who we are. We know the difference between the reality of freedom and the illusion of freedom."

Ratty wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 12:30:Only one of those fallen sites I ever visited regularly was Voodoo Extreme. I never really liked it there for some reason. But it was all there was after my favorite Stomped changed from a gaming aggregator to on online gaming league. I was real sad about that. Then after a little bit at VE I discovered Blue News and never looked back.

Here's hoping Blues has many more years until it too appears on a list.

I found VE after Blues, but VE was the one that I spent most of my time on. I loved the community, loved Billy, etc.

After Billy left it obviously lost its personality, but Apache was doing an excellent job with the news. He gave most of those duties to some guy from the UK named Burns and, as one would expect, it took a very UK slant. Release date news was UK based, event news was UK based, and being in the US it became less relevant but still had the good community.

Then they sold out to IGN, deleted the board (with all the history), replaced it with IGNs boards (which I had no interest in signing up for), and to Blues I came. Went from an occasional anonymous poster to actually registering.

So... blame IGN for me being here, even though I've been reading since probably 1997.

Only one of those fallen sites I ever visited regularly was Voodoo Extreme. I never really liked it there for some reason. But it was all there was after my favorite Stomped changed from a gaming aggregator to on online gaming league. I was real sad about that. Then after a little bit at VE I discovered Blue News and never looked back.

Here's hoping Blues has many more years until it too appears on a list.